That night, as John and I strode across rainy fields to Irene’s guest cabin, I saw Jamie standing and waving at the edge of the woods, where fallen leaves collected against the wire fence that separated bare trees from January’s austere pasture. No ghost, of course, just a poet’s fancy. I’d seen no photograph, and to this day I have no idea what he looked like. But, erotic idealist that I am, I imagined a lean, good-looking young man in standard country-boy garb—flannel shirt, Levi jacket, faded jeans, and work-boots—with an auburn beard and a big smile. I saw a younger version of myself, really. As I lay in bed, in the dark beside John, watching the gas flames of the heater flicker, listening to rain on the pitched roof Jamie had helped build, I thought about him, how similar we were: both mountaineers, both men who loved men. I know better than most what a difficult combination that can be. I know how hard it can be to continue when preachers and politicians condemn you and complete strangers revile you, how exhausting it is to live in a constant state of siege. I wished we’d met, split a few beers, gone four-wheeling together, made some music with his drums and my guitar, cursed the conservatives, shot the shit about the pains and pressures of being an Appalachian gay man. I grieved a brother I never knew, and wondered why, faced with similar pressures, he ended his life and I have endured to this gray-bearded age.
What saved me? Figuring that out might serve as a spring tonic of sorts to ameliorate the woods’ winter darkness, and it would lighten the mood of this talk considerably.
My family saved me.
My mother taught me Southern manners, hospitality, and how to care for people unselfishly (the unselfish part is still difficult), all of which has made for fairly harmonious relationships with other human beings. I am a good friend, good colleague, good neighbor, good host, and at least a tolerable spouse because of these lessons. I am not entirely self-absorbed; I am honestly concerned about the welfare of other human beings, especially those who have been kind to me. (Those who are not kind to me receive the assiduous and patient attention of my considerable dark side.)
My father was much less interested in other humans than he was in the outdoors. He took me walking in the woods and fields of Summers County, West Virginia, where I grew up. He pointed out the trees, then pointed out the trash along the side of the road. From those walks came an abiding love for the natural world and a savage disgust at the way civilization is trashing the planet. Later, this early influence led me to a degree in Nature Interpretation from the Forestry Department at West Virginia University and a dedication to Wicca, a neopagan religion predicated entirely on a sense of the sacred in Nature and in the rhythms of the seasons. More recently, my father’s teachings have led me to a violent detestation of mountaintop removal mining and the wealthy politicians who allow that blasphemous practice to continue.
My father also brought me up to read—I was eagerly tackling The Iliad and The Odyssey by the seventh grade. From his great favorites the American Transcendentalists, in particular from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and from Thoreau’s Walden, I learned to reject as best I could the restrictive dictates of society, to live with a sort of honest and defiant individualism. Daddy (yes, I’m a southern man, so, at age 47, I still call my father “Daddy”) also encouraged me to share his vast contempt for the more intolerant brands of orthodox religion. When, at age sixteen, I realized I was gay, these lessons were to prove golden. It was easier to follow my heart’s and my hormones’ dictates with confidence and without guilt. What polite society and the church had to say about my erotic leanings was never much of a concern. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” claimed Emerson. And “What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” And “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” And when my parents finally discovered my sexual orientation, they did not reject me, as Jamie’s father did him. They did not turn cold and throw me out—all of which happens, be sure of that; I have heard enough painful tales from other gay people to know. After taking some time to adjust to this unwelcome fact, they accepted me wholeheartedly. My father, in fact, has published several op-eds and letters to the editor in West Virginia newspapers defending me, and the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender community in general, from pious homophobic attacks.
My grandmother and aunt saved me. They taught me the stories of my family, and this has helped me realize that I am not some emotional mutant, some inexplicable oddity, but one of a line of complex, passionate, conflicted people who will have his embattled time in the sun before joining his ancestors in the cemetery on that little hilltop near Forest Hill, West Virginia.